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Christmas Cards Made 2016

Wednesday, 24 June 2015

Once again, it is time to enter your Christmas cards here at the Rudolph Days Challenge. You have until the last day of June to enter your Christmas card or Christmas themed project.

Here is a recap of the rules in case you are new to this challenge.

1. The Rudolph Days Challenge will start each month on the 25th, and will close on the last day of that month.
2. The theme is always Anything Goes, as long as it is Christmas.
3. One entry per person and you just need to enter one Christmas card or Christmas project.
4. You may combine your entry with other challenges (maximum of 10 in total).
5. Your card (or Christmas project) should not have been previously posted to your blog. It should be posted to your blog during the current months Rudolph Days Challenge, (between the 25th and last day of the current month)
6. Please link back to or at least mention, the Rudolph Days Challenge.
7. Prizes will be shipped anywhere in the world.

8. The winner will be selected by random draw and announced on the first day of the following month.

My card this month has a vintage feel. I recently attended the garage sale at my local paper crafting shop. Crafters can rent a table in the parking lot and they rope off that area to foot traffic only. There was a plethora of cardmaking goodies all reasonably priced. I picked up several items and these stamped manila tags found their way into my shopping basket as well. The tag was a bit too long for my card, so I chopped off the top and used it like an image stamped on kraft! Matted it with a snippet of red and distressed the edge with the side of a pair of scissors. As too often happens, one edge looked slimmer than the rest...so I matted it again, and tried to balance out the look of it.

A few snippets of snowflake DP, Prima brown chalk ink around the edges, some glitter, scattered red rhinestones, a sentiment and I called it done!

I may not get round to visit you all the same day you link up here as I have a house full of company at the moment. I will get round to visit and thank you for submitting your creations,it may just take me a day or two!

It was Karen's turn to chose the theme for Christmas Card Club this fortnight. She chose the fun theme of a Pink and White Christmas card. I do not have a supply of pink Christmas DP so chose to use three shades of pink card stock instead. The main pale pink card is pearlized card...just for a bit of extra shimmer.

I decided to make a card that featured some of my favourite dies. There are two sizes of Impression Obsession snowflakes on this card and love both sets. The Merry Christmas is Couture Creations Magical Christmas, and I gave all the die cuts a liberal coat of my other favourite supply...Stardust Stickles! I should buy shares in that company as I use it so much!

A few dollar store pink diamond bling scattered across my snowflake centres, and I was done.

Best of all this card is slim enough to fit through the regular post. Bonus!!!

I am entering this card in the following challenges:
1. Christmas Card Club - Pink Christmas
2. Pixies Crafty Workshop - must use snippets

Tuesday, 16 June 2015

Many of you may remember my blog posts about my gardens back at the old house. While we loved our garden, it simply became too much work.

This post is mainly for my Mum. She lives 4 hours away and would like to see my new garden. I have mentioned that the new garden is very tiny...teensy tiny in fact. We were worried that we would have a hard time getting used to the smaller size, but have embraced the beauty of a 15 minute tidy up and we are done!

So here is our new back garden in all its teensy glory! Half the back garden is taken up by a covered patio. We added river rock all around it and varied the size of the stones in places. DH took out some of the worn out, scrappy lawn and made a stepping stone walkway to the patio door. He laid finer stones around the slabs and build a bit of a raised bed along side it. I tucked in a few perennials from the old house and eventually will add a few more. I like my garden beds stuffed so full that you can not see the dirt! Sadly, until they grow larger, way too much dirt shows for my liking!

Here is a close up of that teensy bed beside the walkway...

And a shot of the whole patio and deck above...

We had a skinny section of lawn at the side edge of our back garden. It was a bit useless as a lawn due to its slope. I wanted a dry river gully with a water feature, but DH voted for more flower beds. He built me two more raised beds and we have a good start on the perennials there. They look a little bare, but were planted when it was 34 degrees here, so they all got a little flagged from that heat. They are bouncing back nicely now. I will add more perennials here as time goes by. I am waiting to map out what I have and when they bloom.
As you can see, DH top dressed the existing scrap of lawn and put down a bit of seed as well. Hopefully it takes and fills in the bare spots for now, as we are not planning to level this and returf it till next year.. I did warn you it was teensy!!!

There are hostas in that two tiered raised bed as well. Sadly, they got their leaves burnt from the overhead watering so I cut them off at the ground and will let them regrow. We will install a timer with am emitter watering system that will help prevent this happening again...just have to find time to get out and purchase it!.

Some phlox, crocosmia, bellflowers, columbines, peony,black hellebore, japanese iris, painted daisy, astilbe, lily of the valley, ornamental grasses, mondo grass, and two clematis round it out for now. Amazing how you can barely see them! lol The three shrubs were already there. I think they are a bit boring but DH likes them. Since he did all the heavy work, I decided to pretend to like them too! lol
Sorry about the hose in the photo. It is so hot at the moment that I leave it set up and water each day, until we get out to buy the new system...

We picked up 5 huge plant pots at Costco and we potted them up ourselves. Some have perennials from my old house incorporated into the plantings. Eventually they will become too large, but we will move them out to the garden beds then. One sits in more shade so I did various ferns and impatience plants.

Another gets full sun so I had fun planting it with various perennials from the old house.

I couldn't resist one with grasses...

And finally a shot of the front garden. Another patchy lawn...we will lift it and returf it next year...

We have a teensy front porch but managed to fit our old garden bench up there. I like to sit and have a coffee there in the afternoon.

Saturday, 13 June 2015

I am still working on my mission to use up some of my stash. UFO's and VOS are first on the list.
When I packed for the move, I was surprised to see just how many stickers I still have. I know they are very passe to a card maker, but my non card maker pals don't mind them!

I am working on a series of beach/fishing/boating/surf/sand type cards, so had an iris case already full of supplies to go with these themes. When I saw this ship sticker in my stash, I popped open the case and threw this one in there too.

I am working from this iris case this week...so grabbed an assortment of papers and embellishments from there and created this card.

I am very proud of the fact that the stamped sentiment is from a couple of years ago and is finally getting used! I had stamped off several onto kraft card, then cut and inked them up for use on some bird cards I was making at the time.

The stars seemed appropriate as you can navigate by the stars and I thought they also suited birthday celebrations. I gave them a generous coating of Stardust Stickles and then coated the largest star in the bottom left corner with Tim Holtz Picket Fence Distress Stickles. I painted some of that on the kraft circle mat and onto the hessian as well! Here is a wee close up...

Sunday, 7 June 2015

Whoops! I am late with my Christmas Card Club submission. I should have posted it first thing this morning but have had a bit of a topsy turvy week...

It was Kate's turn to chose the theme and she picked A Christmas Scene. Now she did say it was however we interpreted it...so...

Getting the overseas Christmas cards into the mail is when I think the Christmas season begins for me. As crafters we spend so much time planning and making our Xmas cards. The joy of getting those into the mail is such a good feeling. I usually have the main decorations up by then...the Nativity, the Christmas decor, etc. Once the cards are on their merry way, then I can get the tree up too!

Had it sitting out to glue down and finally got it done.This is another snippets card. The image is a precoloured Wild Rose Studio topper. matted with a scrap of dark charcoal card. That is sitting on a piece of unknown Xmas DP...another one from my bits box. The embellishments are Simple Stories I believe, and the wee red heart is a leftover from Valentines.

Saturday, 6 June 2015

I won this pretty poppy die from Di at Pixies Crafty Workshop. Di has a snippets challenge there that is a lot of fun. We all have snippets lying about and it is great to make a card with them and get some of those pesky snippets used up!

I have cut out the poppies with a snippet of fairly heavy white card. I thought the heavy weight was the best choice as those slender branches could tear so easily. I used a piece of wax paper between the die and the piece of card and delicate as they are, those slender branches popped right out!

I coloured the poppies and the grassy hill with chalk as I wanted a very soft look., and I'm happy with how it turned out. I glued most of the poppy diecut onto a Spellbinders Parisian Accents die cut (left over from another project), but did pop dot a few random flower heads. Another snippet of pale pink card, a larger snippet of Heidi Grace DP placed over a tent fold card, and this card was done.

Monday, 1 June 2015

Another card from Little Mr P. He got this one coloured up, chose all the papers and cut them out. Then with a big ole tired sigh, he turned to me and said "can you glue it all together, I want to go watch Odd Squad with Grandpa".

Not too bad for a shared credit card! lol
Since he carefully chose to use some snippets, I will take his card over to visit Di and the others at Pixies Crafty Workshop.